Time Woes

VIGNESH [vignesh1986 at gmail.com]

Tue, 6 Mar 2007 21:25:59 +0530

Hi!
I have 3 distro`s installed in my system , Debian Etch , Xubuntu Feisty
and PCQLinux 2007(Based on Fedora Core 6). My TimeZone is Asia/Calcutta. Is
there anyway I can make all the distro`s show the right time.I don`t want to
use NTP since the system is not connected to the Internet all the
time.. Since Each time I boot into a distro it adds 5:30 to the system clock
and shows it as the time. By afternoon it shows 10 pm the next day ! Is there
anyway to make them show the right time ?

> I have 3 distro`s installed in my system , Debian Etch , Xubuntu Feisty
> and PCQLinux 2007(Based on Fedora Core 6).My TimeZone is Asia/Calcutta.Is
> there anyway I can make all the distro`s show the right time.I don`t want to
> use NTP since the system is not connected to the Internet all the
> time..Since Each time I boot into a distro it adds 5:30 to the system clock
> and shows it as the time.By afternoon it shows 10 pm the next day !Is there
> anyway to make them show the right time ?

You clearly have mis-informed(!) your O/Ses about the computer clock.
In the solution outlined below I assume that you want to keep your
system clock at IST(=Asia/Calcutta). There is also a solution which
keeps the system time at UTC which is left as an exercise.

Do the following in all your O/Ses:
1. Configure your systems to not assume the system clock is UTC.
(In Debian/Ubuntu this is in /etc/default/rcS "UTC=no").
2. Configure your systems use IST as local time (using tzconfig).
3. Configure your login environment to use system time.
(Remove any configurations of TZ you may have in your .bashrc).

Do the following *once*:
4. Set your computer clock to the "correct" IST time as per the
radio station.

On a separate note. It is no longer necessary to keep re-booting your
system to "enjoy" multiple distributions. Many different
virtualisation solutions are currently available. You can run all
three of your O/Ses at the same time (providing you have a
sufficiently quick system).

On yet another note. NTP would not work for you anyway since it only
"adjusts" the clock. It would normally not attempt to fix a drastic
deviation like 5:30 hours.